a nothing in this office as ever filled it since it was erected.  There is one benefit, however, I enjoy from this loss of my court interest, which is, that all those flies which were buzzing about me in the summer sunshine and full ripeness of that interest, have all deserted its autumnal decay, and from thinking my natural death not far off, and my political demise already over, have all forgot the death-bed of the one and the coffin of the other.’

Again he wrote to her a characteristic letter:—­

’I have been confined these three weeks by a fever, which is a sort of annual tax my detestable constitution pays to our detestable climate at the return of every spring; it is now much abated, though not quite gone off.’

He was long a helpless invalid; and on the 8th of August, 1743, his short, unprofitable, brilliant, unhappy life was closed.  He died at Ickworth, attended and deplored by his wife, who had ever held a secondary part in the heart of the great wit and beau of the court of George II.  After his death his son George returned to Lady Mary all the letters she had written to his father:  the packet was sealed:  an assurance was at the same time given that they had not been read.  In acknowledging this act of attention, Lady Mary wrote that she could almost regret that he had not glanced his eye over a correspondence which might have shown him what so young a man might perhaps be inclined to doubt—­’the possibility of a long and steady friendship subsisting between two persons of different sexes without the least mixture of love.’

Nevertheless some expressions of Lord Hervey’s seem to have bordered on the tender style, when writing to Lady Mary in such terms as these.  She had complained that she was too old to inspire a passion (a sort of challenge for a compliment), on which he wrote:  ’I should think anybody a great fool that said he liked spring better than summer, merely because it is further from autumn, or that they loved green fruit better than ripe only because it was further from being rotten.  I ever did, and believe ever shall, like woman best—­

    ’"Just in the noon of life—­those golden days,
      When the mind ripens ere the form decays."’

Certainly this looks very unlike a pure Platonic, and it is not to be wondered at that Lady Hervey refused to call on Lady Mary, when, long after Lord Hervey’s death, that fascinating woman returned to England.  A wit, a courtier at the very fount of all politeness, Lord Hervey wanted the genuine source of all social qualities—­Christianity.  That moral refrigerator which checks the kindly current of neighbourly kindness, and which prevents all genial feeling from expanding, produced its usual effect—­misanthropy.  Lord Hervey’s lines, in his ’Satire after the manner of Persius,’ describe too well his own mental canker:—­

    ’Mankind I know, their motives and their art,
     Their vice their own, their virtue best apart,
     Till played so oft, that all the cheat can tell,
     And dangerous only when ‘tis acted well.’